On the Duty of Thinking: Pascal Bruckner and Latin America

Even though some of his books have been translated into Spanish, received good reviews in important publications, such as the monthly Mexican journal Letras Libres, Pascal Bruckner is not a very well read writer among Latin American intellectuals. Due to the publication of La euforia perpetua/Sobre el deber de ser feliz (Perpetual Euphoria: Essay on the Duty of Happiness) and La tentación de la inocencia (The Temptation of Innocence: Living in the Age of Entitlement) he has been invited to participate in two of the most prestigious books fairs in South America, one in Caracas, Venezuela, and the other in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but he is still a marginal figure. This incongruity can be explained. In the Spanish part of the continent where intellectuals had grown up reading the French cannon both past and recent, from Sartre and Bataille to Julia Kristeva and Derrida, anyone would expect Bruckner to be a very well known writer. Nevertheless, the circumstances have changed and French essayists since the end of the pre-and post-fall-of-communism period are being read very little. Perceived as too right wing conservative by the left wing conservatives, Bruckner is avoided by the Latin American leftist intelligencia. In the midst of a decidedly unscrupulous ideological opportunism, the verdicts of intellectual rigor cannot be accepted and read. The conflict is there: the Latin American left-wing is recycling anachronic proclamations and Bruckner offers a way of thinking that attacks the unfulfilled aspects of reality without falling into Manichaeistic ideological alibis.